You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - The 3 Motions

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

For this episode, Adam explains 3 different types of harmonic motion you can use under a melody using the 6th diminished technique. Have a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipeCheckout courses from Adam, Peter and more at Open StudioLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Twitter | Instagram

I'm Adam Maness, and you're listening to the You'll Here at Podcasts. Jazz Explained. Well, it's another solo episode. Today, we are talking more about a little six diminished tip. I'm deep in the six diminished stuff. Barry Harris's brilliant theory on building harmonies, the six diminished scale of chords recording a course actually this week. So any open studio members out there interested,

look for that on your dashboard very, very soon. And this is something that is very, very fun. And this is something that our own Chris Parks, on Open Studio Pro talks about a lot, and I've seen in a lot of other Barry Harris resources, and something I've been working on myself and my own playing, and I think might be very handy for you. It's the three types of movement that you can use with the six to minutes.

So the six to minute scale of chords is basically just a way to harmonize individual melody notes or improvised melody notes. It's not, here's the chord change, here's the chord. It's what is the right accompaniment for each, literally each note, of the melody or certain notes of the melody. You don't have to do every single melody note, but it's very, very handy for just that purpose. And so there are three main kinds of movement that you can use under a melody. You can use parallel movement, of course. That's like the number one way people use the sixth diminish to start, is just everything moves

with the melody, right? If my melody is, I can use parallel movement moving everything with that melody in the same direction up and down. So that's pretty cool. But there's also oblique movement and contrary movement. And those two are what I want to talk about today. So what is oblique movement? Obliq movement is when one note stays the same and the other moves in any direction. So up or down, but one of the notes is staying constant. And so this is a really fun. If you haven't practiced this with your six to minute practice, get ready, because this is going to be super, super fun. So this is best when the constant note is the melody, I think.

It's the easiest at least to get going. So if the constant note, or it could be a long note, it can be a repeating note of a melody or it can be a very long held note for like a bar or two, this is great to use. So the first thing that might come to mind would be Bye Bye Blackbird, right? So you have these four quarter notes,

and you can syncopate that ever, however you want. That doesn't matter so much. But what does matter is that it's all this A natural over an F. And so we can use our six diminished movement, right? So that melody is staying the same. But I'm doing this six diminished movement, right? That movement between the F major six and the G diminished, right?

The two chords of the scale of chords. So what I'm doing here, because this is an interesting melody, right? because on bar two, it goes up to that four, which of course you could use that G diminished to voice that, right? So you have four A's in a row. So typically if you were to do parallel movement, you would do just all F major six on that first bar

and then up to the diminished for the B flat and then back down to the F major six. But for this, I'm gonna start, because that B flat is on beat one, and we have four equal notes here, I'm gonna start, start on the diminished. So here I have A on top and right below it I have E and G. So like two notes of that G diminished. And I'm just going to move those down for the second one to D and F. So we have like an F. It's like a D minor triad, literally.

Right. So and then I'm going to at a certain point, there goes C sharp and E, right, that's part of that G diminished. I might even throw the G in there. So now I have three notes underneath the E. So it could be like, right? So in four movements, I went, diminished six, diminished six. And you could go down, when you get to the B flat, you could go B flat below, C sharp E. And then when that B flat in the melody comes down to A, you could bring those up for a little parallel motion. So oblique, that is some beautiful movement, right?

So it just gets you instant counter melody. You could, by the way, do this with just one accompanying note. like, right? That sounds pretty cool actually, but I like the full chords too. Beautiful. And then when you get to that B flat, you could go parallel. You could go contrary. So that is some oblique movement. Really, really fun. See if you can find some other melodies like one I've been playing along with or playing around with is on how high the moon. Right? You have this double A here. So you could do something like and then you have this B that's held. So you could do it actually twice in a row, the oblique movement.

So here I have D, G, A, A, B, right? It's all over a G major chord, and that's the melody. D, G, A, A, B, and B is held, which gives us another opportunity for some oblique movement underneath that held note. And so what we could do here is the six, right? So literally just do like a four-way close thing. E, G, B, and D on the D melody. Then another G-major six, right? B, D, E, and G.

Now you would do, typically, if you were just doing everything parallel, you would do two of these C-diminish shapes, C, E, flat, F, sharp, and A. So it would be like, that'd be a typical parallel movement, kind of the standard. But check it out. We're here, right? We're on our C-sharp, or sorry, our C-diminish shape with the A on top. Why not take it up or down?

For the second A, take it up or down to a G major 6. Because it's a G major chord, right? Isn't that cool? So you can... I love that. I like going down a little more. Get to this nice G major 6-9 chord. So that's like beat 1, right?

And then you have this B. It resolves to this B. But instead of just going right to a G6 under the B, we can do some oblique movement going up. Go back to that C-diminish shape, right? Which is the diminished of the 6 diminished. and then resolve it. So the whole thing could sound like this.

Oh, this is so sweet. You know what I mean? The first four, you could do that again here, just a, but giving you this resolving. Now that is oblique motion here. With that B being held, it stays the same. And I'm moving that six diminished up, those three notes, C, E, flat, and F sharp

to D, E, and G, right? D diminished six. Let's hear that again, that's so sweet. Man, that is some good stuff. So that's oblique motion. It works really well with, like I said, when the melody is like a repeated note or a very long-held note.

Think about how many long-held notes there are in some of these melodies. You know, even something like on Green Dolphin Street, you could do a diminished before you hit that six chord, you know? Anyway, lots of opportunities there to play around. I encourage you to go check out, you know, any of the standards that you already know and see where these opportunities might lie.

Days in Wine and Roses. oblique motion there. Anyway, let's talk about some parallel motion. I actually did a video about the difference between drop two and drop three, and it really was about parallel motion in the end. And I did it on the tune on Green Dolphin Street, and it's a really fun way to look at this. We can achieve some contrary motion here on the B section.

And this is so cool. And we can use things like drop three to locked hands drop two drop three right locked hands anytime

basically what we're doing here is anytime there's a melody going up if we do this pattern of locked hands drop two drop three we can get contrary motion

because our left hand is going down our right hand is going up if we do locked hands drop two and drop three in a row. And if we want to go in, like if the melody is going down and we want our left hand to go up, we can do that in reverse, right?

We can do drop three, drop two, and locked hands. So what does that mean? So let's start here. I'm going to start. We'll not talk about this yet. Let's start in this second note here. So here I have a locked hands. F minor 7.

We're in the key of E flat here on Green Dolphin Street. F minor 7 in locked hands. And so that means I have F, A, flat, C, E, and F. It's an octave delivery device. And then I'm going to, this is all going to be like an A flat, six diminished, right? The relative major six diminished are F minor seven. That way we get a nice five chord, right? This G diminished chord, or E diminished or B flat diminished, however you want to think about it.

Really what it is is like a C7 flat nine. So here we have our locked hands, F, A flat C, E flat F. And then our second chord is the melody goes up to G. We'll do a drop two of this G diminished. So we have G on top and then from the bottom up, E, B, and D flat, so this nice open voicing. You go from a closed voicing to an open voicing. Now here's where it goes from good to great.

When the melody goes up to A-flat, which is back to our six chord, right, our A-flat-6, we go drop three, meaning that the third note from the top is dropped. So if we have here our A-flat-6 with A-flat on the top, that's C, E-flat, F, and A-flat. We take the third note from the top, E-flat, we drop it down. And octave, we put it in our left hand. So drop two is in our left hand, we have E in our right hand, we have B flat, D flat, and G. Drop three, in our left hand we have E flat. In our right hand, we have C, F, and A flat. This is so good.

Just this movement here. And you could leave off maybe this E flat on the F, just for like an F triad. If you want a pretty pure four-note movement, you could certainly leave off a note. But here, just going from locked hands to drop two to drop three between the six diminished, six diminished. Again, we're in F minor here, so it's an A flat six diminished, A flat major six diminished. So A flat six, B flat diminished, A flat diminished, A flat diminished, locked hands drop two, drop three. But you can just practice this.

Works in every key. And it gets you, like I said, that contrary motion. And there's so many cool ways you can do this. You can do drop two with a five-note voicing with that drop two on top, going to drop three with a five-note voicing. It can get very, very cool. I just encourage you to play around with it. Honestly, check out any melody that moves up like this one.

Here, this is, again, a G diminished in drop three. So the third note from the top, this is the first note of the melody on the second. ending, right? Giving us parallel motion. It's locked hands, drop two, drop three. And then here we have locked hands, drop two, drop three. Isn't that awesome? So this is again, B flat diminished.

And this is all B minor six diminished over our B flat altered, which we don't have to get behind the theory behind that, But just know that you can use a B minor six diminished over a B flat to get a nice altered sound. So I've gone full super nerd on you today. And if you like the super nerd stuff, you should check us out over on Open Studio Pro. We're there every day practicing this kind of stuff. If you want to learn more, go to OpenStudioPro.com. And that's it for me today.

We're going to do some listening on Friday. And until then, you'll hear it.